Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter
Ethnography collection website
The Royal Albert Memorial Museum approached us when we first started talking about our CultureObject collections online solution and asked if it could be adapted to fit their data, and if so whether we could build a new site for them. We obviously jumped at the chance..
Mike was brought up just down the road from Exeter so knew the museum very well already and had watched with interest its incredible transformation into the beautifully designed and wonderfully accessible space that it is today. On the web, RAMM are also one of the thought leaders in the museum space – and one of the many ways they are forward-looking is a public API where all their collections data can be queried.
The site is a great example of why producing an easily queryable API such as this is a powerful thing to do. Because the data is available to us in a nicely strutured format, we can use our open source CultureGrid plugin. The plugin is designed for just this purpose – to talk to an API or data file and bring in the content/data natively to WordPress. Once it’s in WordPress we can do interesting things with it: search, galleries, individual record / record linking, and further integration such as sidebars with “random object” searches and so on.
The site itself is a bespoke designed WordPress theme built to fit with RAMM visual standards. Under the hood we have our usual “modular” framework which allows content editors to easily surface complex content in lots of places around the site while only having to write it once.
The team have been brilliant in providing great content for the site – and testiment to both their skill and the ease with which WordPress can be picked up is the theme section of the site which was partly populated by their curatorial staff.